Chapter Seventy-Eight – M21

Chapter Seventy-Eight – M21

“Now that we’ve seen everything these aliens can throw at us, I’m certain our brave soldiers can handle them!”

–General Legstronger, USMC, 2026.

***

“Wait, there’s another bunch of them here,” Gomorrah said.

I sighted down the length of my Icarus, then nodded. “Burn away.”

We were some hundred metres down that last tunnel, and I was beginning to suspect that the hive was bigger than I’d thought. Sure, there were plenty of dead plants in that last big room, but the tunnel had dozens of roots crossing the floor, some of them splitting off and rejoining others seemingly at random.

We kept finding dead bodies at first, burnt Antithesis, but that stopped after a while.

The marks across the floor, as if bodies had been dragged off, weren’t reassuring at all.

Gomorrah stepped up to a crack in the wall, one the roots were using to hang on and where a bunch of small seed-pods were starting to grow. The aliens within weren’t any bigger than a fetus and they wouldn’t get any bigger as Gomorrah sprayed them with a shower of liquid fire. “That’s that,” she said.

I nodded. “Let’s keep moving,” I said.

A couple of my mecha cats leapt ahead, scouting out the mine before we reached it, in case some Model Nine was pretending to be a rock or some piece of root or something.

“The roots are getting thicker,” Gomorrah said.

I looked at them, then nodded. They’d started off no thicker than my wrist. Now they were around thigh-sized. “Yeah. I think maybe that hive I burned wasn’t the main thing after all.”

“If it wasn’t, then the Antithesis learned how to excavate. The maps show that most of the rest of the mine is all tight passages. Though… there is an intersection coming up—should be a bit wider.”

“Great,” I said.

“It looks like Cause Player is down one of the other tunnels; a good distance away, but still coming closer. If he’s killing everything there, then we’ll only have a very short mineshaft left to explore, and it ends after about fifty metres.”

So, that was it. If we cleared out this last bit of tunnel, assuming we didn’t miss anything, then everything in the mine would be cleared.

One of the mecha cats rumbled, a low growl that had my hackles rising and my breath catching. I squinted ahead, and my sight zoomed in on… something.

The last intersection was wide enough to let one of the mining trucks turn without too much trouble, and they were big trucks.

Something was filling the intersection almost entirely, and it wasn’t until we were a little closer that I realized that it was another hive, but one that was different.

Instead of a sort of sparse jungle with dozens of wide trees rising up and holding onto seed pods, this one was more like a massive lump on the ground. One covered in flowers, with a few thicker roots poking out of it that seemed to be gestating new models even as we approached, but still, just a big lump.

“Funky,” I said.

“Should we burn it?” Gomorrah asked.

“What kind of question is that?” I asked.

“Well, not burning it might make it easier to check out the last tunnel.”

That was a fair point. We hadn’t stopped walking, and were within a dozen metres of the edge of the room when our conversation was interrupted.

“Careful.”

I stopped dead, hands tightening over my Icarus and eyes scanning everything, ceiling included. “What is it?” I asked. Myalis rarely warned me about stuff. She was more of a ‘let her figure it out when it hurts her’ kind of person.

“That’s the egg incubator for a Model Twenty-One.”

It felt as if my mouth went dry all of a sudden. “The bigger the number, the more fucky the alien, right?”

“As a general rule, yes. Model Twenty-Ones are a stealth model.”

“How big are we talking about here?” I asked. I was scanning the rocks and ground, looking for anything that stood out, anything that could be a Model Nine but worse.

Approximately two metres long, one tall. Six legged, with each limb having a gripping hand. They have segmented plates over their body that are made of a heavy iron-rich compound. Six hearts, two brains. Relatively heavy, but also very fast. Favours close-quarters combat.”

“Cat,” Gomorrah said. Something in her tone had me looking out the same way she was.

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I couldn’t see it at first. It was just a small haze in the air, barely visibly against the rest. Maybe in full daylight, when I wasn’t looking through the colour-shifted night vision of my mask.